You may be right here about hte future. We may not have monitors any more. All will be done virtually and in 3 dimensions, live ...ha, it would be great.
Back in the 70s, I had a chance to play with a test 3-D image display device that had no screen. You placed you chin in a holder--kind of like the glaucoma tester at an optometrist's office--and two projectors projected the images directly upon your retina. The image was very cool. However, you had to keep your chin perched on the holder and had to remain still...which was not very cool. The concept ultimately failed.
We're not going to keep producing more and more sophisticated photography equipment without hardware and software to process it. Abobe isn't going anywhere soon. Neither is a computer -- in whatever form -- that will run it.
moonpeep wrote:
We're not going to keep producing more and more sophisticated photography equipment without hardware and software to process it. Abobe isn't going anywhere soon. Neither is a computer -- in whatever form -- that will run it.
For sure. In the early 80s, we were manipulating big TIFFs with the equivalent of Photoshop on minicomputers the size and shape of coffins...the same thing I'm doing today on an off-the-shelf laptop.
In the future--ten years, maybe-- the expection will be that any wedding photographer should be able to produce the equiivalent of "Avatar." The equipment to produce that might be totally contained in the form factor of what we consider an off-the-shelf PC today.
I don't think the PC itself is dying, but it's surely heading to more of a application server/servlet model with "dumb" tablet running any given browser instead of a full OS. I'd call it something more like the death of the giant front-end operating system.
"What may happen, though, is that what we do now with popular devices will become do-able only on specialized devices. "
That would really be a problem because the cost of specialised digital darkroom equipment (as opposed to a PC running Photoshop) would I suggest be astronomical! Speaking personally I love the fact that a PC can be a digital darkroom, office, DVD player, games machine, stereo, all using basically the same affordable hardware. Its that flexibility that motivates me to spend. Specialist kit is expensive kit and I pray things don't go in that direction. My current PC edits photographs very well and cost £500. My first and highly customised digital darkroom PC circa 1995 cost me £6000 - I don't want to go back down the cripplingly expensive specialist kit route!
In the meantime people are welcome to strain their eyes with piddly little hand held devices!
pocketfulladou wrote:
I don't think the PC itself is dying, but it's surely heading to more of a application server/servlet model with "dumb" tablet running any given browser instead of a full OS. I'd call it something more like the death of the giant front-end operating system.
Now, over on the thread titled "computer without internet," people are basically arguing the opposite.
The typical PC for home use may be disappearing but for engineers, designers, architects, scientists and others in the tech field will be using PCs for quite a while more. So photogs who need them shouldn't worry.
Aren't tablets and smartphones part PC anyway? I think that our definition for these devices will evolve, merge and expand until they become integrated devices that wouldn't be recognizable today.
David Baldwin wrote:
In the meantime people are welcome to strain their eyes with piddly little hand held devices!
Don't hold back... tell us what you really think about viewing pictures on anything except a computer monitor!
The days of asking people to "come here and take a look at this picture" are coming to an end. Have you ever carried a laptop from one room to another so that you could show something to someone? Today you hand them your iPad or other handheld device. Once I process my images on my desktop the first thing I do is check to see how they look on my iPad. That is how I share my images. We are not bound by a cumbersome device like a laptop or desktop anymore... things change.. it happens.
I still have a feeling that we'll eventually watch films in a three dimensional space, with the option to walk throughout the scene, rotating around the actors, if we so desired.
jwp721 wrote:
Don't hold back... tell us what you really think about viewing pictures on anything except a computer monitor!
The days of asking people to "come here and take a look at this picture" are coming to an end. Have you ever carried a laptop from one room to another so that you could show something to someone? Today you hand them your iPad or other handheld device. Once I process my images on my desktop the first thing I do is check to see how they look on my iPad. That is how I share my images. We are not bound by a cumbersome device like a laptop or desktop anymore... things change.. it happens.
Eventually the PC probably will die, our files will be held in 'the cloud' and applications will be run from here also. We will be left with mobile devices and large screens with internet connectivity in the home.
Mark_L wrote:
Eventually the PC probably will die, our files will be held in 'the cloud' and applications will be run from here also. We will be left with mobile devices and large screens with internet connectivity in the home.
From the point of view of someone who once did nuclear targeting, that sounds like an awfully vulnerable society.
But as has already been mentioned, just because popular tech goes that way, it doesn't mean there won't be specialized "big iron" technology that remains in the same form factors, data moving point to point and still traveling over fiber if not copper.
Most likely, the computer of the future will be a marriage of what we consider a PC by 2012 standards, and what we presently consider a tablet to be. Like everything else, the attributes that best serve the desktops and laptops of today will be integrated into a device that also possesses the convenience and immediacy currently in our tablets.
Manufacturers will have a new brand name for the machine, but the consumers will embrace it as a 'computer' in the traditional sense of the word.
If the technology enables us to edit 1000 RAW files in the palm of our hands, with the option for a large external display, keyboard, Wacom and mouse, then it's still a computer, just smaller in scale. Early laptops were nothing more than word processors. Today, one can stream video, edit photos, edit video, scour the internet, play Blu Ray and more from a laptop. The same will happen with tablets.
I think the terms computer and tablet will become infused as technology advances. The same way tape replaced vinyl, and cd's replaced tape, and mp3's are dominating the technology. However, we still call them albums, although that term truly relates to the bifold and trifold features of a vinyl record sleeve. Like a book or photo 'album'.
RDKirk wrote:
From the point of view of someone who once did nuclear targeting, that sounds like an awfully vulnerable society.
But as has already been mentioned, just because popular tech goes that way, it doesn't mean there won't be specialized "big iron" technology that remains in the same form factors, data moving point to point and still traveling over fiber if not copper.
There may but as is the way with a lot of scientific processing work which is run offsite at large computing centres I can see adobe et al offering something akin to Sun's vision in the 1990s.
I think the terms computer and tablet will become infused as technology advances. The same way tape replaced vinyl, and cd's replaced tape, and mp3's are dominating the technology. However, we still call them albums, although that term truly relates to the bifold and trifold features of a vinyl record sleeve. Like a book or photo 'album'.
Music content producers are not using MP3, and despite the fact that professional cinema producers are making good use of DSLRs, they aren't doing away with their "big iron" either.
This is the Pro Digital Corner, and it will be some time before professional "big iron" fully goes away. As I mentioned earlier, I once needed a minicomputer to do what can now be done on an ultraportable laptop...but it's still advantageous to hook it to a big calibrated screen (consumer screens aren't going anywhere near high quality any more than MP3 is), a tablet, and a keyboard.
Actually, the OP is hung up on terms. If we talk about the "PC" we're not really talking about the size of the computer at all. We're talking about the aspect of a single user having full access to a single data processor.
Regardless what goes on in the consumer spaces, it's going to be a while before I depend on Google or any other consumer service that absolutely for my livelihood. I expect within the next year I'll create my own "cloud" environment, but put it all on Google--not real soon.
Music content producers are not using MP3, but they surely are not recording to wax or tape. They are recording digitally. The architecture of those file is the same as the specs in an MP3, just with a lossless, high fidelity codec, like a RAW file for a DSLR.
For the record, I was simply referring to semantics of the terms we use as a culture in that example.
RDKirk wrote:
Music content producers are not using MP3, and despite the fact that professional cinema producers are making good use of DSLRs, they aren't doing away with their "big iron" either.
This is the Pro Digital Corner, and it will be some time before professional "big iron" fully goes away. As I mentioned earlier, I once needed a minicomputer to do what can now be done on an ultraportable laptop...but it's still advantageous to hook it to a big calibrated screen (consumer screens aren't going anywhere near high quality any more than MP3 is), a tablet, and a keyboard.
Yes, but your big screen might be how you stream tv shows or video from some central place, it might be how you view the person(s) you are speaking to on the phone, it might be how you shop for your new shoes...and it might be how you edit your images all without having a computer sitting next to you. Might not be today, but possibly tomorrow. If you want to call this gizmo a specialized computer that is OK, but it will definitely be different than what we consider a computer today. This has absolutely nothing to do with you being a Pro photographer. It has everything to do with technology advancements and the way technology companies make money is to continue releasing new must have technology that continually changes how we carry out our daily lives.
So yes, I believe the PC as we know it today will be drastically morphed into something that is different 5years from now and totally different 10 years from now.
